Headless Backup of the System Drive with Clonezilla

This will be an example of how to backup your system drive headless, meaning no monitor attached to your OMV. Before doing this you should setup a static lease for your OMV in your router settings. I will make another post and provide a link on how to setup a static lease for your OMV for DD-WRT. This way your OMV will always be assigned the same IP address when booting to an ISO disk like Clonezilla.

1) First you need to make a backup folder on one of your data drives:

Source Code

root@omv:~# cd /media

root@omv:/media# ls

2bbe0e3b-6558-4336-b2d0-c7a541166236 cdrom

3c889f0c-1e0e-4049-9be9-338b738037b8 cdrom0

89cc2475-6cea-480c-a1bf-7739ce10e83e

root@omv:/media# cd ./89cc2475-6cea-480c-a1bf-7739ce10e83e/

root@omv:/media/89cc2475-6cea-480c-a1bf-7739ce10e83e# ls

aquota.group aquota.user lost+found storage2 uploads

root@omv:/media/89cc2475-6cea-480c-a1bf-7739ce10e83e# mkdir backups

root@omv:/media/89cc2475-6cea-480c-a1bf-7739ce10e83e# ls

aquota.group aquota.user backups lost+found storage2 uploads

Display All

2) Go to the plugin section and install openmediavault-backup plugin
3) Then go to System/Backup and then click the Clonezilla TAB on the right. (See Pic1)
4) Click on the Install butoon. This will download the latest Clonezilla ISO to your /boot folder on the system drive. (Pic1)
5) Click on Clonezilla button. The will set grub to boot to the Clonezilla ISO one time. (Pic1)
6) Then click on reboot. (Pic2)

7) Now start a Putty session to your OMV with the IP address you setup with your static lease. Should be the same address you always use with your OMV. (Pic3)
8 ) Sign in with these credentials:
User: user
Password: live
9) To start Clonezilla use this command:
sudo ocs-live
10) Select "Use local device" and then press TAB til OK is highlighted and press ENTER (Pic4)
11) Press ENTER to continue (Pic5)
12) Now we need to select the partition where the backups folder was created so it can be mounted. I created the backups folder on a Seagate NAS drive and it is showing as sda1. So highlight the partition where the backups folder is and press TAB and hit Enter on OK. (Pic6)
13) Now you will be presented with the root level of the data drive that was just mounted. You should see the "backups" folder listed. Select it and then press TAB to highlight OK and hit ENTER. (Pic7)

14) Press Enter to continue (Pic8)
15) Select beginner mode. Press TAB to highlight OK and the hit ENTER. (Pic9)
16) Select "savedisk Save_local_disk_as_an_image". Then press TAB to highlight OK and hit ENTER. (Pic10)
17) Choose a filename for the saved image. I just use the default. Then press TAB to highlight OK and hit ENTER. (Pic11)
18) Now we need to select the system drive to image. Use the UP and DOWN arrows to highlight the system drive system drive and then press the SPACEBAR to put an ASTERISK in the brackets. My system drive is a 120 gig Intel SSD. Then press TAB to highlight OK and hit ENTER. (Pic12)

19) Select "-fsck-src-part Interactively check and repair". You need to do this because if their is a current problem your disk will not properly image. If it finds errors let it repair them by agreeing to any prompt presenting the error. After selecting interactive check and repair press TAB to highlight OK. Then hit ENTER. (Pic13)
20) Now select "Yes, check the saved image". This done to make sure the image is restorable. Press TAB to hightlight OK and then hit ENTER. (Pic14)
21) Press Enter to continue... (Pic15)
22) press y and hit ENTER to continue (Pic16)

Now the system drive is being imaged... (Pic17)

Imaging was successful and it is restorable.. (Pic18)

After the imaging was done it actually shows the exit screen (Pic19) but you can scroll up to see that the image was successful. Now you are done. Select 1 to reboot and press TAB to highlight OK. Hit ENTER. Your system should reboot and be back running OMV....

The backup plugin has made this process very simple even for headless systems. There is no excuse for not backing up your system drive after major changes/updates. After you have done this a few times you will be able to do it much faster. Steps 1-4 can be skipped the next time you make an image. Those steps are not required all the time if you have a current ISO image of Clonezilla in the /boot directory.

PS- If someone figures out the character set for partclone let me know. I'll fix the pics with weird characters or asterisks. Pisses me off when this stuff is not working right with UTF-8.